BUILD Making a Plex server. First time building a PC - unsure about hardware selection.

[mark543]

So I've spent the weekend doing research, reading all the guides I could, and I've gone through quite a journey. My original proposed build was a mini itx set up, with an i5 and gigabyte board, then I learnt about ECC ram and not to use kingston, and how much of the damn stuff I'll need... anyway, here's where I am at the moment, I think this will be ok, but since I've read so much, and so many different options, I wanted to make sure I was making the right choice here.

I'll be using this box for storing media, plex (transcoding on the fly). and torrents.

Going to go RAIDZ1 (I'll be keeping a spare hard drive, in case one fails, so I don't see why I'd need an extra disk of redundancy - perhaps some of you may be able to convince me otherwise?)

So here's my build:
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCL-F-O
RAM: Crucial 32GB (2x 16GB) 240 Pin DIMM DDR3 Memory Module (seems overkill, but apparently I need 8GB + 1GB per TB of hdd space, and them some for plex and torrents...)
Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230/3.2 GHz Processor (hoping this is at least equivalent to an i5)
Case: Fractal Design ARC Mini R2 micro ATX case
Hard Drive: WD Red 4TB (x5 - apparently that's the optimal number of hard drives for z1)
PSU: Corsair Builder Series CXM 430W Modular 80 PLUS Bronze (I have absolutely no idea what size I need. Is 430 enough? and what the heck are semi-modular cables? Do I need them?)

Never built a PC before let alone a NAS box :/

Does this look OK? Am I missing anything?

My biggest worry is I don't know if the motherboard will support a 16gb ram module?

Thanks!

 

[Jailer]

Board is a decent one but older series. You're building new so no reason not to go with the x10 series boards.

Memory is the wrong stuff. You need UDIMM's not RDIMM's. And good luck finding 16GB modules. You'd likely find a unicorn first.

If you are going to have an extra drive laying around throw it in the pool and go RAIDZ2. You lose more than one drive in your pool, that shiny new one sitting on a shelf gathering dust will do nothing to protect your data.

That's all I got.

 

[mark543]

Oh ok thanks. Is there any disadvantage to using the mobo I selected though? Not so easy to find an x10 that has support for RAID5 it looks like from the spec sheet.

 

[mark543]

Never mind

 

[cyberjock]

Oh ok thanks. Is there any disadvantage to using the mobo I selected though? Not so easy to find an x10 that has support for RAID5 it looks like from the spec sheet.

Uhh.. you DON'T want a board that has RAID.... at least you don't want the RAID and should disable it. So I'm not sure why you're saying it's not so easy to find an X10 with RAID5 support as that shouldn't be a consideration at all.

 

[marbus90]

If you're buying a spare HDD, there's no reason to not use all 6 in a z2. With drives bigger than 1TB therre's a big chance of getting a read error during rebuild, which destroys the whole pool - therefore two redundancy drives are the way to go. You could wait for a RMA on the dead drive without waiting for a resilver to finish or risk having no redundancy at all.

And yes, X9 series is outdated - X10 with E3 v3 CPUs is the way to go.

 

[danb35]

The X9SCL is a fine board (it's what I'm running), but as others have posted, if I were buying today I'd get an X10 board (probably the X10SL7 in my case). The E3-1230 is roughly equivalent to an i7 CPU, and should be more than enough for what you want to do.

You don't want any kind of RAID controller on the motherboard, as FreeNAS handles that in software. Fortunately, neither the X9 nor the X10 boards really have a RAID controller anyway.

For RAM, more is always better, but you could probably start with 16 GB, and upgrade to 32 if performance is poor.

 

[mark543]

After all of your comments, here's my updated build:

Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X10SL7-F-O
RAM: Crucial CT2KIT102472BD160B 16GB (2x 8GB) Memory Kit (I will buy another of this if i need to, the mobo has 4 slots, so should be ok?)
Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1225V3 CPU 3.2GHz
Case: Fractal Design ARC Mini R2 micro ATX case
Hard Drive: WD Red 4TB (x6 - RAIDZ2)
PSU: Corsair Builder Series CXM 430W Modular 80 PLUS Bronze (I have absolutely no idea what size I need. Is 430 enough? and what the heck are semi-modular cables? Do I need them?)

Does this look ok then? I hope the hard drive config is ok.
Does anyone know how to figure out what power supply i'll need? Thanks!

 

[danb35]

For the power supply, I often see Seasonic recommended over Corsair. The size should be plenty. Make sure you get the 1230v3 cpu, not the 1230v2.

 

[Ericloewe]

Sounds good. If your budget allows, get a Seasonic G-450. The quality (build and output) is significantly better and it's more efficient.

 

[marbus90]

Since you only have 6 HDD bays in that specific case, you might want to look for those Supermicro boards which don't have the LSI SAS controller onboard - the Intel ports are just fine:
X10SLL-F
X10SLL+-F
X10SLM-F
X10SLM+-F
X10SLM+-LN4F

Also you don't need a Xeon with integrated graphics, that's already on the motherboard. E3-1220 v3 is just fine.

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, the X10SLM+-LN4F is an odd choice (except maybe in virtualized setups with individual NICs for each VM), but the X10SLH-F also works fine.

 

[marbus90]

There is also LAGG. Not always the best choice, but if you can utilize 4xGbps links, that board is nice.